“Arthur tried to keep his illness from me. I suppose he did for a while. I’d give anything to go back to then, back to not knowing.”
“He leave you a pretty bundle?”
“Some. Enough. It’s not the same as a life,” Violet says. “The truth is, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“What do you like?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t like people.” She is so surprised by the statement that she has to pause. “I don’t mean that. I just mean I don’t like—don’t want a job dealing with people.”
“Your brother’s got a bunch of tests you could take,” Barnstone says. “They examine your personal preferences, your talents, let you know what you might enjoy doing. I could get photocopies for you. Not supposed to, but that’s just not the sort of rule I respect.”
“That might be a smart thing to do.”
“You want to hear a song?” She grabs the guitar by the neck. “No,” Violet says. “I’d rather not.”
“You’re a frank one.”
“I don’t like rock music. It made me something of an outcast when I was young—and now, too, for that matter.”
Barnstone laughs. “It’s childish, I guess, but it has a lot of vitality. Maybe that’s why you don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you.”
“I’m not offended.”
“You seem to think Jimmy despises you. He doesn’t despise you.”
“Oh? He’s fond of the Barnstone? I’m not saying your brother is a bad man, but I’m a woman approaching sixty, not in the least attractive or useful to him. I don’t mother him, and I don’t kowtow. He just doesn’t see the point of me.”
“That’s severe, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. But he’s a young man, driven by all the things that make young men go—young women, for starters, and their own sense of themselves. Mercy, I grew up in rock and roll. Give a young man an audience, and he’ll tell you every thought that ever entered his head. Give him a typewriter, and he’ll crank out several hundred pages. He’ll provide you every thought that’s dawdled in his head, and revise everything he ever did wrong. And here’s the most confusing part of it all—I love the company of young men. That kid Mick is a doll, Bellamy Rhine at his core is a sweet boy, and Billy Atlas, a wonderful kid.”
“Billy’s hardly a kid. He’s thirty-three, same as Jimmy. They went to school together. Friends since elementary school.”
“That surprises me.”
“It surprises me and I’ve known them both forever. It’s a piece of my brother’s life that makes no sense to me.”
“My, you’re a hard case.”
“You’re one to talk.”
Barnstone laughs again. “Can’t argue with that.”
It’s good that Jimmy has stepped away from the directorship, Violet decides. Otherwise he’d eventually have to fire someone like Barnstone, who considers making trouble a matter of honor. And, of course, there’s Billy, who will certainly have to be dismissed one day soon. Before going out into the water, he revealed that a newly designed spider box arrived at the sheltered workshop, and the packets of hose did not fit in them. Instead of calling the factory for direction, he had the crew cram the packets into the boxes. Billy told the story as if it were funny. “Had to cover the losses coming and going,” he said. “I guess I didn’t have to, but I figured I oughta.” He paid the factory for the ruined product and reimbursed his crew for their lost wages. He found it all terribly funny. He and Karly are out there now, together, waist deep in the water. God knows what their relationship is, but it can’t be appropriate. Someone will have to terminate him, and thank god it isn’t going to be Jimmy.
Alonso makes a happy bellow. Vex is in the waves now, too, in his pants and shirt, up to his belt with Billy Atlas—Karly on one side of Billy and Vex on the other. Both have their arms over Billy’s shoulders.
“Jimmy’s not going to marry her,” Violet says, as if Lolly is among the splashing group. She takes a moment to look for Lolly and Mick out in the deep water, which makes her picture Lolly’s bathing suit. The ridiculous string bikini didn’t surprise Violet, but she was astonished at the faded tattoo on Lolly’s abdomen—a Medusa with snakes for hair and aimed downward, pointing (or gaping) at Lolly’s privates. The tattoo doesn’t fit with Violet’s conception of Lolly, but her attitude about the woman has too much momentum to be easily altered. “I can see this breakup coming like trains approaching on the same track.”
“If you ask me,” Barnstone replies, “she shouldn’t marry him.”
“What is it with you and Jimmy?”
“He’s reckless. He plows ahead without worrying about the people in his wake. I’m not talking about me, necessarily.”
“Then why this animosity toward him?”
“He’s such a poster boy for the other side, an opportunist. And the way he’s going about it, there’ll be bodies on the side of the road.”
“But if he has withdrawn from the job . . .”
Barnstone sighs. “That changes things, sure. I suppose. Unless it’s a ploy.”
Violet doesn’t like these accusations against her brother, but she can’t pretend she hasn’t had similar thoughts. “He asked Lolly to marry him after they’d spent two weeks together,” she says, “so I suppose I can guess what you mean.”
“And if you’re right, now he’s going to toss her aside.”
“Did you notice that tattoo she has? What does it look like to you?”
“Like a poor erasure.”
“But what was it originally?”
“A spider, obviously.”
“It’s not obviously anything.”
“A black widow with the red hourglass and everything. Your Jimmy boy can tell you after they’re married.”
“You think he’ll go through with it?”
“Why are you so obsessed with your brother’s wedding plans?”
“I introduced them—not in any romantic way, just . . . I thought the tattoo was a mythological creature.”
“I have a tattoo on my ass,” Barnstone admits. “Got it back in the days when only bikers and hard rockers had them.”
“What is it?”
“A lawn chair.”
Violet bursts out laughing.
“I had a band called the Lawn Chairs. I was dead certain we were going to be superstars.” She reaches again for the guitar. “Don’t scream. I’ll keep it short. It’s one of my old songs.”
“I don’t like rock and roll.”
“I know. You’ll hate this.” She plays a few very low chords and then begins strumming fiercely. The lyrics are about the war, the machine, the man, and pollution. Her voice is an expressive, deep-throated grumble. The song ends before it becomes completely unbearable.
“Well,” says Violet.
“I was a headbanger for a long while. And good at it. Good at a crappy thing, but still good, you know?”
“Yes,” Violet says, “that was splendidly awful.”
“Thank you. Any crappy things you’re good at?”
“I cared for my husband while he was dying. That’s a pretty crappy thing, but I don’t know that I was all that good at it.”
“I bet you were just fine.”
“There were a few times near the end . . . this particular day that we were in the van, going to get him a new chair—a new electric wheelchair, quite the apparatus. The old one kept breaking down and we were in a van with a lift in the back.” I still think he’s handsome, Lolly had said one day near the end. The memory strikes her so suddenly that Violet cannot continue speaking. She and Lolly were searching a medical supply store for a head immobilizer that would not restrict Arthur’s vision, and Lolly said, I still think he’s handsome. Violet turned on her fiercely. No, god, stop it! The muscles in Arthur’s face could not keep the corners of his mouth from drooping. His eyes had retreate
d into the sockets like a lizard’s. Don’t patronize me. I’ll leave you here, goddamn you.
“Go ahead,” Barnstone said, “you were in the van, going to get a new chair.”
“Sorry,” Violet said. “There was this Irish nurse, a man named Denny.” Arthur’s favorite nurse because he brought him beer and poured it down his belly tube. He would hold Arthur on the bed so that he could make love to Violet. “Denny was driving the van, which left me to watch Arthur, riding with him in the back. At some point his breathing tube rattled loose, and I didn’t notice. Arthur turned his eyes up to me and moved his eyebrows. His head was strapped to a brace. By that time, he could not speak or lift a hand. And he was suffocating while I held his hand, that awful flaccid hand.” No, she realizes, there had been no strap on his head. Lolly had found a head immobilizer. She had gone out on her own and purchased it for him.
“Violet?” Barnstone says.
“Honestly, I don’t know how anyone put up with me while that was going on.”
“Tell me the rest of the story.”
“I sort of screamed when I realized the tube was loose. I cried out and I was on my knees trying to get it back in. Denny pulled over, and while I was fumbling, he came charging into the back and got it in place, got him breathing again. Arthur never quite lost consciousness, but I almost killed him.” She takes a moment to control her own breathing. “Denny reconnected him to his laptop. A wire attached to his eyebrow—he could still move his brows. He typed a message.” It was so arduous to type anything, but he wrote to her. “Four words: like going to moon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It was thrilling. That’s what he was telling me. To almost die.” For a moment, she can see that face sinking in on itself, the mischievous eyes, those articulate brows. She had not wanted him to die. She so desperately had not wanted him to die. No matter how ruined his body, she had not wanted to lose him. Why is it so impossibly difficult to admit this to herself? Whatever scrap of him remained, she had not wanted to lose.
Barnstone offers her a spare towel. “You miss him.”
“I used to. All the time, I used to.” She misses him, she understands, with all her heart. She cannot engage other people for missing him. She cannot stand being with people who are not him. She opens her mouth to say the next thing, but Lolly and Mick are approaching the tent, weaving in the sand, and Lolly tells them over and over how Mick rescued her.
Your type is always being rescued, Violet thinks to say but keeps to herself. Let’s not pretend it’s news.
While the others listen to Lolly’s tale, she finds herself thinking about Tucson—not, at long last, about either of her brothers or her parents or her late husband, but about the desert. Perhaps what she missed about the U.S. has more to do with landscape than with family or personal history. She couldn’t see that until now. Her grief and other people’s business have camouflaged her desires. What is that word? There’s a specific word for when it storms in the desert and the dry arroyos will temporarily reclaim their purpose, rushing to fill the scorched banks, emptying into a desert basin. A bolson. The temporary lake is called a bolson, and it may hold a slice of rainwater a mile wide but only an inch deep, a watery mask that will vanish the first hot day.
“I thought I’d pegged out,” Lolly is saying.
Violet supposes that pegged out means passed out or drowned or died—some idiotic Briticism the woman has appropriated. For a moment, she can see the computer screen of Arthur’s computer: You re tooo hardon her. Perhaps what he meant was that she should learn to overlook the woman’s (many many many) faults. For better and for worse, Lolly is the person who helped her get through Arthur’s demise.
Violet closes her eyes and what she sees is the painting in Jimmy’s office, Pook’s painting, and as she drifts toward sleep she understands that it is not a self-portrait but a painting of Jimmy, Pook’s vision of his brother. She cannot explain this insight but she believes it. There’s something about the way the figure stands, and the way the mouth . . . how the slightest bit of sly pleasure . . . and something more: Jimmy is Pook plus the intervention of time, time visible within him, those days of the week encapsulated by his transparent body. Perhaps that is what was wrong with Pook, that he could not embrace time. Can that be a disability?
Violet keeps her eyes shut. She wishes to look at each of his paintings again, study them and identify the figures. She has to tell Jimmy. Perhaps later, they will tell their parents. Pook was painting the family all along. These thoughts come to her without remorse or pain but with a sense of relief that is remarkably similar to happiness. She is over her brother’s death, she realizes, which leads her to understand the next thing: one day she will be over Arthur’s death. This thought is hard to take, as she thought she was already over it.
Violet takes a long breath and opens her eyes. Lolly has planted herself on the towel where Barnstone had lain. Violet puts her arm around Lolly’s sun-warmed shoulders. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she says. And later that afternoon, when the two are again lying together, having moved out of the sun and into the tent, the animosity Violet feels for Lolly finally evaporates. She feels a connection with Lolly she cannot name. (Let us name it for her: they are women unfairly abandoned by men who made promises.) Speaking softly, almost a whisper, Violet says, “You should come to Tucson with me.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lolly says, “All right.” After a few seconds, she adds, “James can find me there as easily as anywhere.”
Violet lets that go. “That tattoo on your abdomen,” she says. “What is it?”
Lolly replies, “It’s the shadow of my former self.”
The power of the ocean to soothe and restore is not simply myth. Billy Atlas feels alive and brave and happy. He glops sunscreen over his sunburned shoulders as he walks along the beach. “You ought to put some of this on,” he says.
Vex shakes his head. “They make it out of what? Chemicals they find in glass and hard metals, that’s what. How else to give the sun the bounce?”
“You’re turning into a fire truck,” Billy says.
“I’ve always been a fire truck,” Vex replies.
They walk along the edge of the water. The others are eating, but Billy’s exercise regimen requires him to hike and not to overeat. Also, he had three burritos on the drive down. He holds a cold beer in one hand, with four more linked together by their plastic collars in the other. He and Vex will get in some exercise while Karly and the others eat and nap and sculpt things in the sand. Karly has a talent for sculpting. She is especially good with mashed potatoes. She has a lot of surprising talents, like how she remembers everybody’s name, how she knew the way back to Onyx Springs when they took a drive in the mountains, how even in getting lost or having a flat tire there is something funny. She has taught Billy a morning routine that he finds especially useful. They stand together outside, their toes aligned on the edge of the concrete stoop, and check themselves out—shoes, socks, pants, the works. Twice, Billy realized that he forgot his belt and once Karly made him change his shoes. He’d put on his red-and-gray sneakers with white tube socks, and Karly said, “You can’t wear those, Billy. That’s silly.”
Billy stared. “What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re really really really ugly,” Karly said seriously. “They’re fuzzy.”
Billy pursed his lips and nodded. “This is exactly the kind of advice I need on a daily basis.” He kissed her then, and they both went inside to fit themselves up with what they lacked.
Sex is still not a big part of the marital picture, but they have broken the ice on two occasions. Once in bed, with only partial success, and once in the shower, a rousing victory. In bed, Karly made a few comments that inadvertently led to complications. “Don’t you have to get big first?” she asked, right as Billy was about to enter her, and later, at another crucial moment, she said, “Is it in?”
&n
bsp; “The first time is always practice,” he said afterward, and she laughed, saying, “Everybody knows that.”
The shower was a different story. Billy was in there to wash the stink off after work, and she joined him. They soaped each other, and there was a moment while she worked up the suds in his hair with one hand that she freed the other hand to grasp the shampoo by taking the washcloth she was holding between her teeth, the cloth hanging from her mouth, lengthening as it saturated. Jesus, that washcloth. They made love standing up and laughing. And afterward, still in the shower, arms around her, Billy found himself crying. A day to be remembered forever: Billy Atlas crying with gratitude or from sheer happiness.
“The problem with beer in cans,” Vex says, staring at his Budweiser, “is the motherfucking cans. You can’t wait to crush the bastards.”
“Anyone ever suggest that you’ve got anger issues?”
“Almost everybody. ’Cept the ones too chicken-bait to talk.”
“And? What do you think?”
“I think I kicked their fucking asses.”
“You haven’t kicked everyone’s butt.”
“I can’t fuck up everybody that deserves it,” he says defensively. “I’m only one person.”
It is obvious to Billy that Vex should not be in the sheltered workshop or, for that matter, in the same zip code as the workshop. Vex has slipped through the famous cracks, and Billy suspects that either Bob Whitman’s counseling report or the evaluation Jimmy did should have eliminated the nutball. But neither Bob’s report nor Jimmy’s evaluation has been handed over, and Billy is pretty sure they’ll never arrive. Bob seems to have an endless number of tools and small appliances that need repair. And Jimmy? Billy understands what the rest of them refuse to see: Jimmy Candler is gone.
Vex drops his can in the sand and stomps on it. Billy gives his own a shake: half a beer to go. Vex leaps with both feet to drive the smashed can into the sand. He has on socks but not shoes, and the toe ends flop as he pounds the can. He picks up the flattened aluminum and slips it into the back pocket of his soaked jeans.
Tumbledown Page 48